Russian

Brestsky Kurier — 11 February 2016

Brest’s Family Tree. At the Crossroads of Those Roads…

Many people will, of course, remember the famous song successfully performed by Leonid Utyosov in the postwar years: “…Three men took the city of Brest, we passed through the city…” This story is about how, in those fateful 1940s, several lives crossed paths with our city.

Maxim Kozyr

Konstantin Simonov wrote about this Hero of the Soviet Union and major general in his book Different Days of the War: A Writer’s Diary:

“Many years later, remembering this man, his outlook on life, his habits and his manner of speaking to subordinates, I based one of the characters in my novel The Living and the Dead — General Kuzmich — on him. But then, in the spring of 1944, of course I was not thinking about that. I simply made a fairly long diary entry about Major General Maxim Yevseyevich Kozyr, fifty-six years old…”

Simonov then gives Kozyr’s account of himself:

“At the beginning of the war I was stationed in Brest-Litovsk. My family was killed in Brest-Litovsk. The political officer’s family and the chief of staff’s family too. Two bombs hit the house where they lived, at night. They were undressed as they were. All that was brought back were scraps. They were later buried in Kobrin. Yes. I did not go to look. They said people brought flowers to the graves. Why didn’t I go? It affected me too much. When the chief of staff saw what had happened to his family, he shot himself. So, in general, all I had left of my family was my mother-in-law, an old woman. She writes to me, by the way. Near Brest-Litovsk all of us major generals gathered and voted, as in the Civil War. I was elected temporary commander of the 4th Army and led its remnants out of encirclement. I got them out…”

Vladimir Gelfand

He took part in the Great Patriotic War, served in occupied Germany after Victory, and was demobilized in 1946. His Diaries 1941–1946 contain an episode about Brest:

2 October 1946. Brest-Litovsk station.

“No German speech can be heard. Russian everywhere — everything stirring, strange, unfamiliar. I want to dance with joy: I am once again, and now forever, on my native soil.

“I have an indecent amount of luggage. I know everything is needed and will be useful, but it causes me so much trouble and anxiety! Sometimes my courage fails and I want to leave everything at the station before the Kyiv train departs. But that does not happen often. Mostly I am possessed by one natural dream — to get everything home: eight small but heavy suitcases, two sacks and a little sack of flour, a violin, and two string bags with all kinds of essentials. It is too much for one person.

“The porter wants to take advantage of my difficulties: ‘I’ll help you load everything, don’t worry.’ But the task is no trifle. We have to agree on payment in advance.

“I offered 150 rubles and a bottle of vodka.

“‘Are you joking? For loading like that people have given me 500 rubles, and then fed me and gave me as much to drink as I wanted.’

“I stopped talking to him…”

Boris Bernstein

Boris Bernstein, memoirist, Doctor of Art History and professor at the Estonian Academy of Arts, includes a curious episode about Brest in 1946 and Georgy Zhukov in his memoir Junior Technician-Lieutenant Abroad, dans l’étranger:

“The second transfer was in Brest. I arrived there with a cold, a high fever, completely dazed. Fortunately I had an address: a recently graduated pupil of Slonim was running the music school in Brest. He welcomed me warmly, fed me, gave me something to drink and let me stay overnight. It turned out that he was an important person in Brest: besides the school, he gave private lessons to the wife of the military commandant of Brest station. So there would be no problem getting a ticket for the international train. Meanwhile, that evening, through the haze of influenza, I listened to various commandant’s stories.

“The commandant was informed that Marshal Zhukov’s private train, with the Marshal himself aboard, would pass through Brest. All the prescribed measures were taken: honor guard, band, cordon, everything as it should be. The commandant himself was ready to meet him, greet him, report to him — and tremble. The train pulled up to the platform and stopped. Nobody came out. Absolutely nobody. Everyone waited. The train was mysteriously and frighteningly silent, a Flying Dutchman on rails. Suddenly a short man in civilian clothes appeared from nowhere behind the commandant, collar turned up and hat pulled down as it should be — with the famous lower jaw peeking out from concealment. ‘What the…,’ said the Marshal… Of the long phrase that followed I dare reproduce only one syllable: ‘What are you, you…’ The rest will have to be imagined, since I do not follow the latest literary fashion in vocabulary. The Marshal was modest; he disliked ceremonial show and servility.”

Andrei Shkarpet

This is something else we should know. His great-grandson reports:

“Our family carefully preserves the story of the last years of my great-grandfather Andrei Fedotovich Shkarpet. His son, my grandfather, told me about him on 9 May, the sixtieth anniversary of the Great Victory. Andrei Fedotovich was a teacher both by training and by vocation. In the 1930s he headed a leading school in Omsk. He then moved with his family to Ufa, where he taught mathematics and physics at an aviation technical school.

“In 1944, as his travel order states, Andrei Fedotovich was sent ‘to restore the public-education network in districts affected by the German fascist invaders.’ His place of work was a teacher-training college in the Belarusian border city of Brest-Litovsk. The college trained soldiers of the Soviet Army who had been released from service because of severe wounds to become secondary-school teachers.

“Although Brest-Litovsk had been completely liberated in 1944, it was periodically bombed by German aircraft. There were many homeless children in the streets whose parents had died. The education system had been completely destroyed; not a single school was operating. The city had neither water nor electricity. These were the conditions in which my great-grandfather had to work. Yet he always managed: receiving a maimed soldier, giving him kind advice, helping him regain confidence and choose the right path. The rest of the time he taught lessons.

“But he was not destined to live to see the Great Victory. Because of constant overwork and malnutrition, Andrei Fedotovich died of a heart attack in April 1945, right in the classroom, one month short of the long-awaited Victory.”

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